Quick Update: Beer, Bread, and Things to Read While Waiting

Beer making is an exercise in patience.  Rather like baking bread, there's a lot of waiting involved. Unlike bread, it's about waiting days for the yeast to do its thing instead of hours for the yeast to do something slightly less alcoholic.

In the meantime, here's someone who actually knows what he's doing with a pile of malted grain and some yeast. I am reminded, while reading this, that I've never done this before and don't really know what I'm doing here. Our old friend the Leatherworking Reverend left this link in the comments of the last post. Read more here (and please come back to be singularly unimpressed with the lack of complexity in my brewing attempts):  http://leatherworkingreverendsmusings.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/brewing-mrs-harrisons-ale-1577/

His stuff is always worth a read.

The oven's ready to go (that's the mouth of il forno up there) and tomorrow we're going assay our first baking. Today, I made the door for the oven using modern dimensional woods, but entirely period tools. I didn't take any pictures because I was also dodging squalls as they swept across the island.

What came across first and foremost is that my ancestors were right on the money when they eagerly traded in their wood-bodied planes for shiny new iron-bodied Baileys from a slick traveling Stanley salesman. I'll get into the quirks and annoyances of properly setting-up and using a wood bodied plane when we get to joinery, but for now let me tell you that even as an experienced woodworker, I was seriously having a time of it.

Hopefully, more tomorrow.

- Scott

A Yeast Affection: Say hello to my little friends...

This is Figaro.

He's not a special historical breed of cat or anything. He's pretty cool and I've had him a long time, but he's not really sure what to make of my strange hobbies. I suppose after 14 years he's seen me do stranger things than learning renaissance crafting, though if you pressed, I think he'd admit he's a bit giddy that there are now two knitters in the house.

Why am I bringing up my grumpy old cat on a story about yeast?

Because I've spent the last decade and a half trying to keep the furry little weirdo away from the stuff. Fig will move heaven and earth to get to anything yeasty. He's been known to try to drink the water we bloom the yeast in for bread dough. Beer, bread, pizza dough... he'll climb you like a tree to get at it.

You would think it was tuna the way he chases it.

Which is one of the many reasons that I was so happy when my friends Patrick and JoNell offered his kitchen and gear for my foray into beer making. They don't have a weirdo yeast-obsessed cat to contend with and brewing is all about sanitation.

Brewing beer at my place would require straining tuxedo cats out of the mash.

Since most of the ale that the Elizabethans drank was made at home, a little cat fur and a couple of miscreant children in the mix might make it more period, but I think people would object. So we're brewing a cat-less batch first time out.

Beer brewing was a fully-fledged industry by the time Elizabeth came to power, but according to Martyn Cornwell's "Beer: The Story of the Pint" (Headline Publishing, 2003) even as late as 1585, over half of the brewers in London were registered aliens.

Why?

Because hops, that's why.  Traditional English brewing happened without hops, and it happened in the home. The histories tell us that immigrants, mostly protestant refugees from the religious wars on the continent first brought hops brewing to England and it was they that drank most of the production of the breweries they set up once they got to London.

Not to be xenophobic, but we're going to take this opportunity to look into the homelives of the artisans, to step out of the workshops and saunter down the street a bit or up the stairs to enter the world of the Alewife.

The bakery and the brewery is going to overlap for us and these projects will take place simultaneously because the line between bread and brew was a fine one in the early modern world. Both were a calorically-dense cornerstone of the English diet and the ale we're attempting will be, in every sense, liquid bread.

Early modern humans consumed mind-boggling quantities of brew, with estimates ranging from two liters per person, per day, to four for a male and one for a child. Reasons given are still dominated by the "Water was unsafe" school, though that is teetering a bit.

Whatever the case, once you understand the rates of consumption, you begin to wonder if people were loaded day and night. The answer is a low-alcohol, calorie-dense, liquid bread.

In search of a beer you can drink all day without turning into a complete sot (an artisan has to earn a living, you know) led me to this book.

My first foray into this very simple method of brewing will be paved by a book by a fast-rising star of fermented history, Cassandra Cookson and her book "Drinkable History". The book is written in a light-hearted and far too short, but it enforces in the reader a desire to hear Professor Cookson give a lecture on pretty much anything.

Her English ale recipe is simplicity itself: Malted Barley, Oats, water, yeast.  She even outlines how to harvest your own yeast and malt your own barley, though we're going to let that project wait for another show.

My high school teachers taught me that fermentation was mankind's oldest trick, the first chemical reaction that humans learned to control.  Control, but not understand.  The brewers and bakers of the ancient world developed some very strange theories about what was going on in their brews and their bread, but it was mostly written off as supernatural until the 18th century and not really understood until the 19th century.

Yet they figured out that bread and beer were working from essentially the same process, and that the foam atop a vat of brewing beer could leaven bread as well as the funk that occurred naturally on the skins of apples.

Which is the latest example in my new presentation, tentatively titled, Our Ancestors Were More Observant than Us.  And so is my cat.

Later, we brew. In the meantime, like the artisans of old, I need to head off to work.

- Scott

Kill it with fire: The Worshipful Company of Cooks, Part One

The smallest of all the Livery Companies had to be the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London. Yet they did exist, so while the clay bread oven I just built is curing (more on that later) we get an excuse to play with food and fire in their name and I get to try my hand at some period recipes.

I've really been looking forward to this one.

If nothing else, this project gives me a chance to post an image from Bartolomeo Scappi instead of my muse/nemesis Jost Amman for a change. Scappi (died 1570) was the personal chef of six popes. His renown, however, is mostly for his magnum opus: Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, Maestro dell'arte del cucinare, divisa in sei libri (roughly: "The Work of Bartolomeo Scappi, Master of the art of cooking, in six volumes"). Scappi's Opera (as it's known) is at once a gossipy memoir of life as the Vatican chef and a manual of instruction for the state of the culinary art, circa 1550-1570. It contains over a thousand recipes/preparations, and is probably the most thorough accounting of the renaissance kitchen that we have available to us.

It also includes a large number of drawings depicting kitchens both inside and outside and all the implements that one could hope to reproduce. Best of all, you can download it free from the Internet Archive. http://archive.org/details/operavenetiascap00scap



Scappi, unfortunately, was decidedly not English. So we'll be using his 'Opera' as one of many resources as we work from period or near-period English recipes wherever possible. Additionally, we'll be using some of the resources produced by the fine folks who put on the cooking demonstrations for the Historic Royal Palaces. Between Scappi and the fine folks at HRP, I think we're in good hands.

But before I get to all that, I have to learn to cook with fire.

Looking at that engraving up there, it seems simple enough:

1. Light fire. 
2. food over roaring fire. 
3. Eat and repeat.

But nothing is ever as simple as it seems at first blush. If this project teaches me nothing else, it will teach me that.

Can you hear me humming "Smoke gets in your eyes"? 

Yeah...

A word about cookware and safety...

The Elizabethans didn't know a thing about bacteria or food poisoning. Their grasp on metallurgy was

pretty good, though, and getting better all the time. Yet they used some metals and alloys with furious abandon that we now understand to be catastrophic to your health. They practically poured lead on their breakfast cereal.

Lead isn't really a relevant worry here since its use is so constrained in modern manufacturing. The place most Elizabethans encountered it was in the glazes of their ceramics and as a potter I can control for that pretty easily. My main deviation from the period is eschewing bronze entirely. Those cauldrons you see in all the paintings? Most of them were cast in the same manner as church bells and from mostly the same materials.

The biggest problem with bronze (aside from weight and expense) is that it's an alloy mostly consisting of copper. In the period it might be blended with lead or zinc, neither of which are good eats, but even modern bronze has its problems and perils. 

I use copper all the time because I have some copper cookware in my kitchen and it tends to be lined with tin if it's intended for household use. But all my cauldrons are cast iron, which is most assuredly not a period metal. Why the deviation? Because cast iron is easier to clean and care for, less expensive, and even if I screw up completely, it won't poison anyone.

Is that really a danger? Sort of... certainly more of a problem than I'm willing to bear on my conscience. When copper comes in contact with acids it can create a chemical reaction that forms what's known as verdigris.  That's the green patina that forms on copper as it weathers. And it's poisonous.

Scrupulous cleaning can keep you safe and the folks at Hampton Court Palace use bronze cookware that was made for them (I believe) by the folks at Historic Castings.

Thermal mass is the key here. As far as I can tell, the choice of metals for my cookware doesn't change the results and the transfer of heat from fire to food doesn't change all that much.

Speaking of cleanliness, I have pots to clean...

More later.

- Scott

Learning Curves and the State of the Project: I know now why apprentices are a Thing...

Part One: History and Hubris 

“History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.” – Henri Fabre

That sounds familiar.

That quote, attributed to Henri Fabre[1], sits at the top of page one, chapter one in the book Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob. The book is a vast and noble attempt to fix Mssr Fabre’s problem, and it goes a long way toward doing so. It is the latest of many books I’ve found and wished I had and/or read before we embarked on this journey. At risk of stacking quotes, an old adage that’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln says that the purpose of reading is to remind us that our original ideas aren’t all that original.

Touché, Mssrs. Lincoln, Fabre, & co. A hit, a palpable hit...

What 6,000 Years of Bread really does well, though, is map out a very reasonable twenty-years spent by the author trying to understand the origins of bread. And it reminds me that what I’m doing here has become less and less about the world, trade, and tools of the renaissance craftsmen and more and more about their tools.

In other words, I’ve gone about this entire thing in entirely the wrong way. 

For instance, when I ventured into the world of the Worshipful Company of Turners, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what kind of lathe to build, how it operates, and how to build one. Then I built one. From scratch.

Now, while I knew this would be part of the process, I wildly under-estimated how long it would take to build all of these tools. (Or perhaps underestimated the size of my own creative ego, you be the judge.)

The next project includes baking and cooking.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my house didn’t come equipped with an Elizabethan spec kitchen any more than it came with a wood shop, which means there’s a cob oven and hob rising from nothing in my back yard. And I’m doing everything myself except baking the bricks.

And I really ought to be baking the bricks except that I haven’t found someone with a large enough kiln yet who will let me near it. 

Which all sort of argues that my project has veered more toward a re-imagining of the renaissance as something that was invented from nothing. Or perhaps springing from some post-apocalyptic hellscape where each piece of technology has to be re-created from stuff I find lying around. 

 Mad Max, circa 1560.

Part Two: Tools and Their Users

Sometimes I feel like I’m not so much learning how an Elizabethan artisan lived his life as reenacting the 1600 odd years that preceded his life as we moved from whittling to bow lathes to springpoles and treadles and onward. Sometimes it’s a bit like studying the lives of Indy drivers and starting by learning how to make tires from scratch...

Because I’m almost literally reinventing the wheel with every one of these projects, it eats into the time I can spend actually learning about the craftsmen and the things they made. Which is fine, studying the tools is a fine thing and I’m learning a mind-blowing amount of information about fabricating my own tools. But I think that the key thing I’m learning is that this should have been two projects: a yearlong preparation stage where I build the tools and then a second year when I learn to use them to create standard period artifacts and study the people who used them.

Which isn't the worst idea I've ever had, actually.

There's an inherent drawback to inheriting your tools. You were either not alive or too young to care when they were purchased. (Actually, in my case, my grandpa was either not alive or too young to care when some of them were purchased.) So you don't have a really close relationship with that punch to the wallet that accompanies some tool purchases.

Seriously, I bought my first new hammer ever just this year.

When I first embarked on this project, I thought that with easy access to the internet, I could get my hands on anything I really needed to get a project done. Going out into the community to see if I could source things locally was a bit of a lark because I could always just order it online. And that's certainly true, as it turns out... but there's a hitch.

Take this adze for instance.

If you've never seen one of those before, that's okay; it's not exactly a common tool in modern America. An ancient tool, the adze is sort of a sideways axe, used to dig out hollows (as with a dugout canoe) or smooth a surface (as shown above).

The adze in the image above was an adze-shaped ball of rust when I found it in the bottom of a bin at a flea market. The seller thought it was a gardening tool, and priced it at the princely sum of $5.99. In the past couple of months, I've procured three adzes in precisely the same manner, and in the same state of disrepair. As followers of the Facebook feed know, I recently spent the weekend bringing them back to life.

That one tool took six hours to bring back to life. I worked the sun into and out of the sky and still wasn't finished with the smaller of the three, a cooper's adze.

It was time well spent and it makes my heart glad. This tool is truly a joy to use, as are the other two.

My forbears left me a big box of serious tools because they took their tools seriously. And even if that wasn't true, standing opposed to the disposable aesthetic is part of maker culture.

Part of what makes me... me.

I also refuse to spend the money on anything that won't survive regular use. (Except computer equipment, which is a rant for a different time.) There's no economic sense in spending a $100 for a tool that will last five years (maybe) when you can buy a thirty or hundred-year tool for $200.

This is complicated by the fact that at the outset of this endeavor, I had to agree not to bankrupt us in my quest. The Engineer is smarter than I am and always has been. She's followed me into many a woodworking store and while I was oohing and ahhhing over the figured cherry, she was flipping price tags. She knew this would not be cheap and extracted a promise from me before I caught on.

See? Smarter.

Everything I could ever possibly need is indeed available to me via the internet, but there's a catch. Real tools cost real money.

Three: The Internet & the Deep Blue Sea

As we've discussed before, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose went down on July 19, 1545, she sealed for the ages a time capsule of life in Henrician England. The artifacts preserved included the tools of the ship's carpenters. Eight chests of period tools, preserved by the waters of the Solent and a strange quirk of unkind fate.

Despite there being eight chests of tools, this is not by any stretch an elaborate or even complete example of a wood worker's trade. The tools aboard Mary Rose were specific to the task of keeping her upright and fighting. Nevertheless this gives us that rarest of gifts for a project like this one: an intact example of a 16th century tradesman's tools.

Which made me wonder what it would cost if I just went out and bought the modern interpretations of those classic hand tools. Hewing as closely as possible to their historical counterparts, of course, and bearing in mind the quality standards already outlines, I pretended I had a Hollywood budget under my belt, composed a selected list of key tools from Mary Rose, and went window shopping.

Broad Axe (Woodcraft).... $300.00

Broad Hatchet (Amazon).... $125.00

Carpenter's Adze (Lee Valley).... $250.00

Hand Adze (Lee Valley)... $50.00

Wimble (A wooden brace or hand drill)... Metal varieties are a dime a dozen. No one seems to sell wooden ones anymore and anyone that wants one, makes one. Antiques are priced from $50 up.

Spoon bits (no spiral bits in the 16th Century - Lee Valley).... $80.00 for a set of five

Bow Saw (Gramercy Tools).... $150.00

Wooden Smoothing Plane (Closest I could find to the Mary Rose example - Lee Valley).... $239

Wooden Rabbet Plane (Or what looks like one in the few pics I can find online - Lee Valley).... $39.50

Marking/Mortise Gauge (Rockler)..... $49.50

Dividers (Lee Valley).... $23.00

Ruler (Primitive).... It's a stick with marks burnt into it. Can't imagine buying one from someone.

Draw Knife (Daegrad).... £ 27.99 (Call it $43.00 at today's exchange rate)

Handsaw (Northwind Toolworks).... $275.00

I stopped when the total hit $1600.00 and remember that he would also have had various nippers, pliers, clamps, and miscellaneous whatnot which were made primarily of ferrous metals and therefore lost to time and tides.

I'm not saying that my tool chest is worth anywhere near that much (because it isn't), or that these are worth that much (though they are) you can see why I rely heavily on the antique stores and flea markets. And why I jumped at a carpenter's adze for under $6.00, even if it was a lump of ferrous oxide.

Also, bear in mind that this list would just cover tools for the carpenter's portion of the project. Leaving aside the overlap with the coopers, joiners, and turners which would still add to the total. There's also cooks and bakers and embroiderers and knitters and spinners and weavers and woolmen...

Thankfully, I am only metaphorically doing this on a stage, so there's no reason for me to go out and buy the perfectly period versions of these tools unless it genuinely affects the outcome in some way. Even Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation advises aspiring joiners to get close and get on with it.



So that's what I'm doing, but it's still slow-going.

Which is why a large and growing portion of this project has been about tools. Hunting, creating, rehabilitating, tools. And if at the end of the year all I've learned or earned is about the tools and toolmaking, I suppose I'll just have to spend another year learning about their users.And I'm going to call that a win.

With that settled, rest assured I will be posting more often in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

- Scott

----------------------
[1] Though the quote is attributed to Henri Fabre (inventor of the sea plane) in the book where I found it, I suspect that it’s actually attributable to Jen-Henri Fabre, entomologist and social commentator who also said “The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.” Which I find similarly germane to my mission.

Turn Turn Turn, for everything there is a cliche, turn turn turn...

I apologize for my absence. I've been having a... thing. I don't believe in writer's block so it's not that, it's just... I dunno. You can read about it at Pages to Type if you want: Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of writers and rituals otherwise, accept my apologies and let us move on to wood spinning in a circle with a blade placed against it...

The Worshipful Company of Turners

My lathe. Up close and personal...

I've never particularly liked turning. Modern lathes are fast and dangerous and freakishly expensive, which combined uncomfortably in my mind with the idea that has often been pushed on me that all woodworkers are aspiring turners.

I am not.

At least not until I discovered that I could build my own lathe, which appealed to my "Make Neat Things" aesthetic and helped me take my first hesitant step onto that slippery slope of wood turning.

The history of lathes is very interesting and rather closely parallels the history of the spinning wheel and the pottery wheel, all of which operate on much the same principals, though not necessarily in the same plane. By the 16th century, there were three kinds of lathe existing side-by-side: the fairly primative bow lathe, the springpole lathe and the treadle lathe, which I gather was a recent invention.

Almost anything that was round in Elizabethan England was turned on a lathe. Even if something was cast, the pattern from which it had been cast was probably turned. Patternmakers love wood and they love lathes.

My old nemesis/muse Jost Amman, of course, has a turner depicted at his trade. The lathe isn't well depicted, but you can just make out the springpole coming across the ceiling and the strap or string that is driving the sphere (apparently) that the guy is turning.

The turner at his trade from Jost Amman's "Das Standbuch" of 1568

I admit I'm curious about why he'd be turning a sphere. If anyone knows, leave a comment. If that's a bowl, he has it on the lathe sideways, but an engraver can't necessarily be expected to accurately depict the nuances of every trade, I suppose.

My lathe was built on the same basic plan as this one I found on Pinterest. I made the heads from two sharpened carriage bolts, which I carefully and painstakingly aligned to give a nice, flat spin for the workpiece.

The string started out secured to the springy limb of a pine tree, a suggestion made by Peter Follansbee in one of his videos, but I confess that I eventually swapped it out for a four-ply bungee rope when I got tired of being whipped by the tree for my temerity. 

Problems to Solve

As you can see from the image below, my oak billet (I'm starting small, a handle for a socket chisel) was chattering something fierce. This happens when the blade of the tool skitters across the work surface rather than biting into the wood as it is supposed. I suspect my lathe tools weren't as sharp as they needed to be in spite of my hours spent honing them. I shall return them to the whetstone again tomorrow and finish off with a good bit on some emery paper and then leather stropping.  

All else being equal, this shouldn't be happening.

Another thing I've decided to add to the design is a drive wheel. I got this idea from an article written by Roy Underhill, who explained that the diameter of the piece affected the speed of the turn. So I sat down with a bit I cut from one end of an old maple rolling pin and milled out a pulley, essentially. The trio of spikes will (theoretically) go into the small piece to be turned and drive it at a higher rate of speed. 

The concavity of the drive wheel should keep the string from creeping, which has been a bit of a problem already.

To compound my sin with the bungee, you can see that I began with a length of nylon paracord that I had lying around. It has abraded with a vengeance and I've already had to deal with broken lines and splicing new bits of line into my machine. 

I will be replacing the paracord as soon as I can with a proper bit of line, hemp if I can find it.

Once I have things worked out and in working order, I will get on with the real task, turning a small wooden bowl like the ones found on Mary Rose. But we're nowhere near there yet.

More to come.

- Scott

Late addition: 
Foot-powered lathes at The Woodwright's Shop with Peter Follansbee and Roy Underhill. Enjoy!

Watch Wretched Ratchet Reading Rack on PBS. See more from pbs.

And then my brain tried to kill me... The state of the project.

The other day on Facebook, I promised to update soon. I promised that I wasn't dead. And because fate has a warped sense of humor, then my brain tried to kill me.

Like it often does.

So... lots to catch up on. Coffee, for instance. Haven't had any coffee since Wednesday and I have a lot of catching up to do. Also there's a kitchen sitting around in pieces that needs to be reassembled so we can, you know, cook food and stuff. Tiling and cabinets and countertops and miscellaneous whatnot await me, but coffee first. 

Because priorities, I have them.

Which brings us back to this project, and most especially this blog, which I have been neglecting, I fear.

I seriously underestimated the toll that accepting a full-time job would have on this project. Especially with all the home renovations that have to be done. The level of organization necessary exceeded my ready supply of tools.  I'm not really good at organization on this scale at home. I do fine at work, juggling huge projects that span entire years, but when I get home... something clicks off in my brain.

Just one of the many ways my brain periodically demonstrates how it hates me.

There's a horn out in the shop that's halfway to becoming a beaker, a half-made bow-lathe that needs some attention, and all the makings of a woodfired oven stacked under a tarp waiting for a dry spell so I can call out the troops to come help build it.

Anyway, I talked to the engineer, and we're trying something new.

Because real, bought and paid for, life trumps blogging projects, the bulk of my time is spoken for. There's just no way around that. Some of what I have to do for the kitchen (tile for instance) will align with parts of this project, but most of it is too modern to fit neatly into Renaissance Artisan business.

One or two days a week, however, will be devoted entirely to this project. Building, experimenting, photographing, and documenting (cough-blogging-cough) will take precedence on those days. We're still working out which days and how, but that's the plan or this is never going to work out.

Like the Facebook thingy said: "one man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks." And we're at the end of week 18. At this rate, it's never going to work and before you propose it, I am not yet willing to entertain the idea of cutting projects. Part of the "fun" of doing this is figuring out how to do it without neglecting the day-to-day of modern life.

Anyway, that's the state of the project.

More later. I have coffee to drink and all the aforementioned projects aren't going to get closer to done by typing.

~Scott

Time-Traveler: The man from nowhen...

"I bet you think you were born in the wrong era," she said. I smiled grimly and shrugged. I didn't want to point out to her that Everyone Says That. And it drives me just a little nuts.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time delving into the past and exploring what life was like at various points in history. I've written about WWII, Prohibition, the Great Library of Alexandria, and Shakespeare. So "Do you feel like you were born at the wrong point in history?" isn't an uncommon or even unreasonable question.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that since I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World no one has asked whether I felt I might've been born on the wrong planet.

It annoys me at times, but it's a fair question because if anyone was ill at ease in the modern world, it's me. Let's face it, I have a lot of skills that aren't of much use in the 21st century.

By the metric of the rest of the country, my childhood was more on like my dad's than it was like the rest of my peers. We didn't have a video game system or a computer of any kind. Dad didn't believe in video games and didn't like computers. I learned to type on a typewriter (as is right and proper) and only saw digital systems when I went to a friend's house or a mall.

My friends refer to this as a 'sheltered upbringing' but I'm not sure I'd agree.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' farm where grandpa taught me woodworking to keep me out from under foot and where I made a lot of my own toys. I built rafts because I read a lot of Huck Finn. They all sank or broke apart, so I swam to shore and built new ones. It was a world of pocket knives, toy guns, frogs, wooden airplanes... I played with GI Joe while we listened to Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio. I watched Star Wars like every other kid of my age, but read voraciously from a library that was stocked mostly with books written over a half century before I was born.

My childhood was a Mark Twain novel ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury, filtered through an Archie comic.

The world that was shown to me on TV seemed distant and somewhat surreal, simultaneously more modern and less than the world around me.

I still prefer hand tools to electric, my typewriter to my laptop, and a printed book to a digital one. I have no real attachment to those wonders of modern technology that people around me can't live without. I don't own a cell phone, though The Engineer has one. It's not inarguable that I really am a man out of my era and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that if given a time machine and license to use it that I'd be off like a shot.

I certainly used to think so. I may have been misplaced several centuries! I said as much to my dad once. Dad, who had very little tolerance for bullshit, looked at me and kind of snorted and said "Take off your glasses."

Touché, Dad. 

I have allergies and poor eyesight and I have an asthma inhaler in my pocket as I type this. Even when I join in a historical reenactment and try to sink into a past age, never far from my mind is the fact that I never would have survived childhood in these past worlds.

Books are my time machine along with projects like this one. This is my preferred method of time travel. If someone offered me a trip through time I might not take them up on it if I cannot close the cover and return to the modern era any time I wish.

And it's not at all about the asthma inhaler. The women around me are valued as highly as the men. My wife is an engineer. My boss is a woman.  I can see someone passing me on the street and talk to them without my judgement of them stopping at the color of their skin. I can say whatever I want here and as long as I don't libel anyone, no one can stop me.

Because honestly... the 'good old days' weren't that good.  The Elizabethan era may have birthed the modern world, but it was still firmly anchored in the medieval. The streets stank of the latrine, death stalked the streets, the laws were Draconian and the punishments cruel, the cast system was becoming porous, but only just.

So until the man in the Blue Box comes to escort me to the opening night of Hamlet and then safely home again... I like this time period just fine, thanks.

Frankly, I like it here. The people are mostly friendly, the medicine is pretty good, and I don't have to worry about people teleporting into my house unannounced yet.

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This post first appeared in a slightly different form on my writing blog Pages to Type Before I Sleep... in February of last year. People keep asking the question, though, so I find myself continuing to answer it.    ~Scott